Managing urban vacancy: Decision strategies for vacant lot reuse in Baltimore, Maryland

Facing significant population decline and a high concentration of vacant properties, the City of Baltimore is seeking strategic and innovative approaches to address urban decline. The application of community-based operations research to city planning offers the possibility of a more equitable strategy. By explicitly incorporating value-focused conversations across a wide range of stakeholders planners can facilitate a more transparent and impartial decision-making process for addressing vacancy that prioritizes social objectives including health and social capital. Focusing on specific end-uses for vacant land, including alternative reuses such as urban agriculture, can enable more holistic and strategic approaches. Careful consideration of the objective functions by which cities make decisions is also necessary to create a model that is both aspirational and practical in its utility. Using the framework of operations research, this thesis evaluates Baltimore's decision-making process for demolition of vacant properties and explores opportunities for applying decision modeling to this process.